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Five college kids, Dana (Kristen Connolly), her best friend Jules (Anna Hutchison), Jules' boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemworth), Holden (Jesse Williams) whom Jules wants to hook Dana up with, and pothead Marty (Fran Kranz) want to spend the weekend in a cabin in the woods (you know the kind, right in the middle of nowhere with no cellphone receptions and miles upon miles of forests around where everything could lurk, and no one hears you scream). There they eventually find a creepy diary in the basement, and reading a Latin spell in it out aloud awakes some zombies that are entombed nearby. Jules and Curt go outside to have sex, but the zombies attack and kill Jules, the most sexually overt of the bunch, while Curt makes it back to warn the others and they barricade themselves in ... which is pretty much a plot so standard there must have been a hundred horror films like this, but there's something different here, as everything that's going on in the cabin and the surrounding woods is controlled by a large corporation situated directly below. They are really the kids' puppeteers, using everything in their power to have them do their bidding, including drugging them if necessary ...

Meanwhile, upstairs Marty, who has long suspected something wrong about the cabin but everybody else thought it was just the pot speaking, detects a camera in his room and starts putting two and two together, when a zombie crashes into his room and drags him away. The other three are trying to get away in their van but find the tunnle they've come through blocked. In their attempts to get away, both Curt and Holden are killed, and downstairs, their puppeteers start to party, as "the virgin" has survived - even though it's less than likely that Dana is actually virginal -, which means they can perform the blood sacrifice to appease the Old Gods - who live downstairs from the complex right under the cabin in the woods. But no, it's only now revealed that Marty has actually survived, and found access to the complex downstairs. No other way out they go there, but it's not much better here than in the cabin, as actually the complex houses a whole array of monsters to release on the woods above, plus its own house army. Dana and Marty though manage to release the monsters onto the complex, then somehow try to make it out alive ...

Sigourney Weaver has an amusing guest spot as the complex's boss.

Hailed as a meta-movie upon its release, Cabin in the Woods is indeed pretty good at playing with horror mainstays, putting together genre tropes in refreshing ways without insulting the intelligence of its audience or betraying its horror roots. The downside though is, despite all of its cliché bending, some of the elements could have used a fresher treatment as they're slightly tiring no matter how you spin it. Plus the finale seems to give it all up in favour of spectacle, which is fun to look at but fails to invest one emotionally. It's still a fun film though, and the idea of the downstairs puppeteers is really fresh, especially since they're also fun characters, and the whole thing is acted, shot and directed really well. It's just not as fresh a shot to genre filmmaking as it was marketed.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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